University of Leeds researcher Luis Figueredo won a prestigious Marie Sklodowska-Curie Fellowship for a project that will enable humans and robot collaborate on forceful interaction tasks. Dr Figueredo explains his project: “In this project, I will develop a robotic planning and control system that performs human-robot collaborative manipulation tasks. The system will enable robots to help a human perform continuous forceful operations on a workpiece—grasping and moving the piece in coordination, in a way that is efficient and comfortable for both the human and the robot. This requires a novel integrated approach involving three components: control, human-interaction, and grasp planning. Such a capable human-robot collaborative manipulation system, integrating control, human-interaction, and grasp planning, is completely novel and does not yet exist anywhere else to the best of my knowledge. I will be working with Dr Dogar, within the Robotic Manipulation Group at the School of Computing.”